Baptism in Roman Catholic Teaching
The gateway to the sacraments · justification by water and the word · an indelible mark that binds the baptized, from the cradle, to the Church of Rome.
Baptism stands at the head of Rome’s seven sacraments, and everything else in her system of salvation is built upon it. In Roman Catholic teaching the water of the font does not merely signify the washing of regeneration; it accomplishes it. By the rite the guilt of original sin is removed, the soul is reborn, sanctifying grace is poured in, and the person is incorporated into the Church and made subject to her. Because infants receive the sacrament within weeks of birth, nearly every Roman Catholic’s first and decisive encounter with grace is one he cannot remember and did not choose.
What Rome Teaches
The Catechism of the Catholic Church opens its treatment of the sacrament with a sweeping claim:
Holy Baptism is the basis of the whole Christian life, the gateway to life in the Spirit (vitae spiritualis ianua), and the door which gives access to the other sacraments. Through Baptism we are freed from sin and reborn as sons of God; we become members of Christ, are incorporated into the Church and made sharers in her mission: “Baptism is the sacrament of regeneration through water in the word.”
Rome holds that baptism is necessary for salvation. “The Church does not know of any means other than Baptism that assures entry into eternal beatitude” (§1257); baptism “is necessary for salvation, as is the Church herself, which we enter by Baptism” (§1277). The Council of Trent anathematized anyone who says “that baptism is free, that is, not necessary unto salvation.”1 The Catechism allows exceptions for martyrs (the “baptism of blood”), for catechumens who die with an explicit desire for the sacrament, and for those ignorant of the gospel through no fault of their own, but it states the rule plainly: “God has bound salvation to the sacrament of Baptism, but he himself is not bound by his sacraments” (§1257–1261).
The sacrament is said to work ex opere operato, “by the very fact of the action’s being performed” (§1128). Its essential rite is the immersion of the candidate, or the pouring of water on his head, while the Trinitarian name is invoked (§1239), and the water itself is first consecrated “by a prayer of epiclesis” calling down the Holy Spirit upon it (§1238). James McCarthy observes, “This almost magical concept of baptism is expressed in the ritual itself.”2 So necessary is the rite that “in case of necessity, any person, even someone not baptized, can baptize, if he has the required intention” (§1256).
The Effects of Baptism
The Catechism names two principal effects, purification from sin and new birth in the Holy Spirit (§1262). “By Baptism all sins are forgiven, original sin and all personal sins, as well as all punishment for sin” (§1263). The baptized becomes “a new creature,” an adopted son of God and “a temple of the Holy Spirit” (§1265), and receives “sanctifying grace, the grace of justification” (§1266). Here baptism and justification meet. Trent named baptism the “instrumental cause” of justification, “the sacrament of faith, without which justification never befel any man.”3
The sacrament also leaves a permanent mark. “Baptism seals the Christian with the indelible spiritual mark (character) of his belonging to Christ. No sin can erase this mark” (§1272). For this reason baptism can never be repeated, and Trent anathematized all who deny that a character is imprinted on the soul.4 Yet the mark secures nothing in the end. The grace received may be lost by mortal sin and must then be recovered through penance; baptism is the first step on a long road, not its end (§1264, §1272).
Baptism and the Church
In Roman teaching baptism makes a person a member not only of Christ but of the institution that claims to be His one Church. “Baptism incorporates us into the Church” (§1267), and with membership comes obligation:
Having become a member of the Church, the person baptized belongs no longer to himself, but to him who died and rose for us. From now on, he is called to be subject to others, to serve them in the communion of the Church, and to “obey and submit” to the Church’s leaders, holding them in respect and affection.
Canon law gives this a juridical form. “By baptism one is incorporated into the Church of Christ and is constituted a person in it with the duties and rights which are proper to Christians” (canon 96), and the Church’s laws “bind those who have been baptized in the Catholic Church or received into it” (canon 11). Trent anathematized anyone who says that the baptized are free from the precepts of the Church unless “of their own accord” they choose to submit to them, and anyone who denies that “the Romish church, which is the mother and mistress of all churches,” holds “the true doctrine concerning the sacrament of baptism.”5 Rome even accepts as valid the Trinitarian baptism of Protestants, for by it they are placed “in some, though imperfect, communion with the Catholic Church” (§1271). Yet the same council condemned the conviction on which Baptists and many others act; as Geisler and MacKenzie remark of Trent’s canon, “This, of course, anathematizes all Baptists and like groups, including the authors of this book!”6
Infant Baptism
Infant baptism is the ordinary form of the sacrament in the Roman Church. The Catechism explains why:
Born with a fallen human nature and tainted by original sin, children also have need of the new birth in Baptism to be freed from the power of darkness and brought into the realm of the freedom of the children of God, to which all men are called. The sheer gratuitousness of the grace of salvation is particularly manifest in infant Baptism. The Church and the parents would deny a child the priceless grace of becoming a child of God were they not to confer Baptism shortly after birth.
The infant cannot believe, so the Church believes for him. “Baptism is the sacrament of faith. But faith needs the community of believers. It is only within the faith of the Church that each of the faithful can believe” (§1253); “children are baptized in the faith of the Church” (§1282). Canon law obliges parents “to take care that infants are baptized in the first few weeks,” and an infant in danger of death “is to be baptized without delay” (canon 867). Trent laid down that infants are baptized “for the remission of sins, that in them that which they have contracted by generation, may be cleansed away by regeneration,” and it anathematized anyone who says that infants, lacking actual faith, should be rebaptized when they come to years of discretion, or that it is better to omit their baptism than to baptize them “in the faith alone of the Church.”7
Origin
The Catechism calls infant baptism “an immemorial tradition of the Church,” with “explicit testimony to this practice from the second century on,” and suggests that infants “may also have been baptized” when whole households were baptized in the apostolic age (§1252). The New Testament itself records the baptism of those who heard the word and believed (Acts 2:41; 8:12; 18:8). Gregg Allison notes that the practice of baptizing infants emerged in the latter part of the second century and was firmly established by the fifth, and that the Catechism passes over the fact that the earliest surviving discussion of it is an objection. Tertullian (c. 200) complained that “innocent infancy” had no need to “rush to the forgiveness of sins” and counseled, “Let them become Christians when they become able to know Christ.” A generation later Origen could write, “The church has received a tradition from the apostles to give baptism even to little children.”8
By the middle of the third century the practice was spreading in North Africa. In 253 Cyprian and a council at Carthage answered a bishop who thought infants should wait until the eighth day, after the manner of circumcision, by ruling that they might be baptized as soon as they were born (Epistle 58, to Fidus). In the next century Augustine’s controversy with Pelagius joined the doctrine of original sin to the necessity of the font, and by the beginning of the fifth century, as Allison writes, “infant baptism became the official practice of the church.”9
Influencing Factors
Several convictions, pressures, and interests worked together to make infant baptism universal.
Original sin and baptismal regeneration. The decisive factor was the belief that baptism washes away the guilt of Adam. Origen stated the logic plainly: “Because the filth of birth is removed by the sacrament of baptism, for that reason infants, too, are baptized.” In Allison’s summary, “the practice of infant baptism developed as a strong link between baptism and the removal of original sin was forged.”10
Fear for the dying infant. If the sacrament is necessary for salvation, an unbaptized infant’s death becomes a terror. Hence the haste that canon law still requires, the provision that anyone may baptize in an emergency (§1284), and the medieval theory of limbo. The Catechism now says only that “the Church can only entrust them to the mercy of God” and that his mercy allows “us to hope that there is a way of salvation for children who have died without Baptism” (§1261).
The efficacy of the rite. Because the sacrament is held to work by the performance of the act, its benefit does not depend on the understanding of the recipient. An infant presents no obstacle, and in this view the gratuitousness of grace is “particularly manifest” in him (§1250).
The faith of the Church. Once the faith of parents, godparents, and Church could stand in place of the faith of the one baptized, there remained no reason to wait. As McCarthy answers, “None of these rationalizations, however, addresses the root problem: The infant is incapable of exercising saving faith.”11
Establishment and the christened society. When the empire embraced the Church under Constantine and Theodosius, infant baptism acquired a new use. Leonard Verduin writes that “men took the existing institution and made of it a ‘christening,’ that is, a ritual whereby every child in the Empire was taken and ‘made a Christian of’ — before he had any voice in the matter.” In his judgment, “It was not so much a concern for the salvation of men’s souls that dictated the baptism policy; it was rather a socio-political consideration.”12
Clerical control. A sacrament received at birth places every life in the keeping of the priesthood from the first days. Loraine Boettner judged that the purpose of excluding unbaptized infants from heaven was “to force parents to commit their children to her as soon as possible. The long range design is to bring all people into subjection to her, to put her stamp of ownership on every person possible.”13
Sacrament and Civil Allegiance
In the Christendom that grew out of the Constantinian settlement, Church and commonwealth were coextensive, and the font was the door into both. A child was baptized into the parish and the realm in the same act; to be a subject was to be a christened member of the Church, and to refuse the Church’s baptism was to put oneself outside the social order. The indelible character taught by Rome gave this arrangement its theological ground: the baptized could never cease to belong to the Church, and so could never escape her jurisdiction or that of the rulers who enforced it.
Rebaptism was therefore treated as a crime against the state. The ancient imperial codes carried a title, Ne sanctum baptisma iteretur (“that baptism is not to be repeated”), and an imperial law preserved in the Code of Justinian (1.6.2) made it a capital offense. Verduin explains why: “If one’s baptism is a sign of one’s citizenship in ‘Christendom,’ then a second baptism is a badge of disloyalty to that ‘Christendom.’”14
The same bond is written into the law Charlemagne imposed on the conquered Saxons in the 780s:
If any one of the race of the Saxons hereafter concealed among them shall have wished to hide himself unbaptized, and shall have scorned to come to baptism and shall have wished to remain a pagan, let him be punished by death.
Likewise, it has been pleasing to insert in these decrees that all infants shall be baptized within a year; and we have decreed this, that if any one shall have despised to bring his infant to baptism within the course of a year, without the advice or permission of the priest, if he is a noble he shall pay 120 solidi to the treasury, if a freeman 60, if a litus 30.
Capitulary for Saxony, chapters 8 and 19
The infant’s baptism was registered by the fine paid to the treasury.15 In 1184 Lucius III directed the bull Ad abolendam against those who, “touching baptism . . . do not hesitate to think or teach otherwise than the holy Church of Rome teaches and practices,” and committed the unrepentant to the secular arm (see Inquisitions). When the Reformation revived believers’ baptism, the old law was turned against it. The Diet of Speyer in 1529 decreed that “every Anabaptist or rebaptized person, of either sex, is to be put to death, by fire, or by the sword, or by some other means.” In 1567, after reducing the Protestant city of Valenciennes, Margaret of Parma ordered that “newly born infants shall upon birth be carried to the parish church in plain sight, to be baptized,” on pain of death for parents who had them baptized another way and for the minister who did it.16
Trent gave the principle conciliar form. Its fourteenth canon on baptism anathematized anyone who says that those baptized as infants, if on growing up they refuse to ratify what their sponsors promised, are to be left to their own will “and are not meanwhile to be compelled to a Christian life by any other penalty” than exclusion from the sacraments.17 The claim outlived the age of the stake. On June 24, 1858, the papal police in Bologna took six-year-old Edgardo Mortara from his Jewish parents on the order of the local inquisitor, because a Catholic servant said she had secretly baptized him when he was gravely ill as an infant. Pius IX refused every appeal to return him, and the boy was raised in Rome and became a priest.18 In August 1873 the same pope wrote to William I, the Protestant emperor of Germany:
I speak in order to fulfil one of my duties, which consists in telling the truth to all, even to those who are not Catholics, for every one who has been baptised belongs in some way or other—which to define more precisely would be here out of place—belongs, I say, to the Pope.19
Rome no longer commands the sword of the magistrate, but the claim remains in her law. An infant even of non-Catholic parents “is baptized licitly in danger of death even against the will of the parents” (canon 868 §2), and “parents and those taking the place of parents who hand over their children to be baptised or brought up in a non-Catholic religion are to be punished with a censure or other just penalty” (canon 1367). As Boettner wrote of the baptismal claim, it is “a commitment which once she receives she never relinquishes.”20 For the relation of the two powers more broadly, see Church and State.
A Biblical Response
Scripture joins salvation to faith in Christ, not to the act of a priest. “For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God” (Ephesians 2:8). The thief on the cross entered paradise unbaptized (Luke 23:43); Cornelius and his household received the Holy Spirit before they were baptized (Acts 10:44–48); and Paul, who rejoiced that he had baptized few at Corinth, wrote, “Christ sent me not to baptize, but to preach the gospel” (1 Corinthians 1:17). Abraham was counted righteous before he received the sign of circumcision, which was “a seal of the righteousness of the faith which he had yet being uncircumcised” (Romans 4:11). The sign confirms what God has promised; it does not create it. Peter himself denies that baptism saves as an outward washing: it is “not the putting away of the filth of the flesh, but the answer of a good conscience toward God, by the resurrection of Jesus Christ” (1 Peter 3:21).
The new birth is the sovereign work of the Spirit through the Word (John 3:8; James 1:18; 1 Peter 1:23), given to those “which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God” (John 1:13). Charles Spurgeon, preaching against baptismal regeneration in 1864, testified from long pastoral experience: “Neither in the righteous nor the wicked do we find regeneration wrought by baptism.”21 The Reformers who retained infant baptism refused Rome’s ground for it. Calvin denied the necessity that drove emergency baptism, insisting “that children who happen to depart this life before an opportunity of immersing them in water, are not excluded from the kingdom of heaven,”22 and Allison observes that “both evangelical credobaptism and evangelical paedobaptism dissent from this historical precedent and its use in support of Catholic paedobaptism.”23
Nor can a sacrament be the bond of an earthly kingdom. “My kingdom is not of this world” (John 18:36), and “the weapons of our warfare are not carnal” (2 Corinthians 10:4). The Church of the New Testament is gathered by the gospel, not enrolled by the font or compelled by the magistrate. The gravest harm of Rome’s doctrine is the assurance it gives to the unconverted. As McCarthy warns, those who rest on their christening hold certificates that are “worthless in the eyes of God, for their faith is not in the Savior, but in a sacrament and in the minister of the sacraments, the Roman Catholic Church.”24 The water of baptism has no power to cleanse the conscience; “the blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us from all sin” (1 John 1:7).
Rome and Scripture Compared
The differences between Roman Catholic baptismal teaching and the Scriptures are set side by side, with Catechism references, in Table RCC7 — Baptism.
